Seizing every opportunity to attack the motives of Gracchus, his opponents raised the cry that he was asking for a crown, and this report was carried into the Senate. Nasica, the bitterest of the enemies of Gracchus and of his reforms, shouted, "The consul is betraying the republic! Those who would save their country, follow me!" and rushed out from the meeting of the Senate. He was followed by many of the senators, and by their slaves and adherents, those who were not already armed breaking up the benches to make clubs for themselves. The followers of Gracchus, without any organization among themselves, were unable to offer effectual resistance to the attack, and soon fled in all directions. Tiberius Gracchus attempted to take refuge in the temple of Jupiter, but the priests closed the doors against him, and, stumbling over a bench, he was killed by repeated blows on the head before he could rise. In this riot more than three hundred of the followers of Gracchus were killed by clubs, or by being driven over the wall at the edge of the Tarpeian rock. The hatred toward Tiberius Gracchus, on the part of the special interests of the time, did not end with his murder. Gaius Gracchus was refused permission, which he sought, to bury his brother, and it was decreed by the Senate that the bodies of Tiberius Gracchus and his followers should be thrown into the Tiber before daybreak on the following morning. Very divergent views have been taken of the conduct of Tiberius Gracchus and that of his opponents by different classes of historians. Historians, equally with politicians, inevitably fall into one of the two classes into which mankind is divided, the class of the radicals on the one hand, or of the conservatives on the other; into the class of those who favor progress and the recognition of the supreme right of manhood, or into the class of those who wish to keep things as they are, and worship before the shrine of vested interests. No single incident in history better serves to bring out the bias of the historian than does that of the efforts of Tiberius Gracchus in behalf of his agrarian law. No historian can write this page of Roman history without throwing open for the inspection of the world the inmost workings of his mind and sympathies. That class of historians who can see more pathos in the execution of King Louis XVI than in the combined misery of the downtrodden millions who lived and died in France under the two centuries of Bourbon misrule, have attempted to cast upon Tiberius Gracchus the stigma of a demagogue, of a reckless leader, of a violator of his country's most fundamental laws; while the conduct of the leaders of the conservative party, who did not hesitate at the crisis to resort even to murder rather than surrender their unlawful profits, is excused as being rendered necessary by the violence of Tiberius Gracchus.